Communications devices employed in voice communications have long suffered from difficulties in effectively detecting voices in noisy environments. This longstanding issue has, in more recent years, become a more prevalent problem with the wide acceptance and use of mobile communications devices, such as cellular telephones. The very fact of their mobility often invites their use in noisy environments with the results that participants in a conversation are frequently asked to repeat what they've said as it becomes difficult to hear them over the background noises detected by their voice microphones along with their voices.
Various approaches have been used in trying to resolve this issue, many of which involve modifications to the design of the microphones employed as voice microphones in detecting voices to attempt to reduce their detection of unwanted noise sounds. Among such approaches have been so-called noise-canceling microphones designed to have a degree of directionality in their sensitivity to the sounds they detect, such that they tend to detect sounds emanating from a given direction to a markedly greater degree than sounds emanating from other directions. Unfortunately, such microphones can be prohibitively expensive, and are still susceptible to environmental noise sounds that by happenstance approach such microphones from the very direction in which those microphones have their greatest sensitivity.
Other approaches have sought to do away with microphones positioned in the vicinity of a speaker's mouth altogether. Among such approaches have been microphones incorporated into earpieces inserted into one or both of a speaker's ear canal in an effort to seal out environmental noises occurring outside the speaker's head, while picking up the speaker's voice as conducted via one of their Eustachian tubes and/or through bone conduction by one or more of the bones of the skull. Unfortunately, sealing the external entrance to an ear canal in this manner deprive a person of the ability to hear environmental sounds in their vicinity that they may need to hear, and can be unbearably uncomfortable for at least some people.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the techniques described herein are needed.